My principles, however, rallied in time, and I came away with a genuine soft felt after all, with nothing but a small hole on each side for ventilation. The soft felt is the only really catholic cover, equal to all occasions, in which you can do anything; for instance, lie flat on your back on sand or turf, and look straight up into the heavens--the first thing the released Cockney rushes to do. Only once a year may it be always all our lots to get a real taste of the true holiday feeling; to drop down into some handy place, where no letter can find us; to look up into the great sky, and over the laughing sea, and think about nothing; to unstring the bow, and fairly say: “There shall no fight be got out of us just now; so, old world, if you mean to go wrong, you may go and be hanged!” To feel all the time that blessed assurance which does come home to one at such times, and scarcely ever at any other, that our falling out of the fight is not of the least consequence; that, whatever we may do, the old world will not go wrong but right, and ever righter--not our way, nor any other man’s way, but God’s way. A good deal of sneering and snubbing has been wasted of late, sir (as you have had more occasion than one to remark), on us poor folks, who will insist on holding what we find in our Bibles; what has been so gloriously put in other language by the great poet of our time:-- That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy’d, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete.